Everything you need to know about 64-bit versions of Firefox for Windows

The stock Firefox browser, with that I mean the releases that are available for download on the Mozilla website directly, can be run on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems. While that is the case, Mozilla did offer a 32-bit version for Windows until 2016. Find out how to download and install 64-bit Firefox here.

64-bit versions of Firefox were available prior to 2016 but they were made available by Mozilla for Linux distributions and Mac OS X only officially.

The 64-bit version of Windows was not offered by Mozilla on the main download site and you could not really find it advertised anywhere on the site; this did not mean that the version did not exist as it was build automatically and pushed to the FTP server.

Difference between 32-bit and 64-bit applications

First, it needs to be mentioned that most 32-bit applications run fine on 64-bit operating systems, but that no 64-bit application will run on a 32-bit system.

One of the advantages of 64-bit software is that it may have more memory at its disposal, provided that that enough is installed on the 64-bit operating system. The physical memory limit of 32-bit versions of Windows is 4 Gigabyte, while 64-bit versions of Windows support more than that. How much more depends on the version you are using. Windows 8 Professional 64-bit supports 512 Gigabyte for example, while Windows 7 Professional 64-bit 192 Gigabyte.

Technically, the 4 Gigabyte limit refers to the addressable memory space which the installed RAM, video cards, PCI memory range and other factors attribute to. That's the reason why you won't see 4 Gigabytes of available RAM on 32-bit versions of Windows even though you have installed that much, as part of it is used by other components. (see this for a detailed explanation)

If you are running Firefox on a 32-bit Windows operating system, it can use 3 Gigabytes of memory at the most. If you run it on a 64-bit Windows system, it can use up to 4 Gigabytes of RAM.

While it is unlikely that most users will run into the limits, new technologies such as web gaming and other real-time activities may increase the RAM needs of the browser, and may push browsers towards 64-bit eventually.

It may take some time until we get there in regards to consumer PCs, but it is not that unlikely anymore that PCs have more than 4 Gigabyte of RAM installed.

Conclusion: if Firefox uses a lot of RAM on your system, you may want to consider using a 64-bit version of the browser to avoid the memory limit.

There may be other benefits: 64-bit applications can perform 64-bit register operations, which is faster than performing the same operation on a 32-bit system. There may also be security benefits to running 64-bit programs as opposed to running 32-bit programs.

Firefox 32-bit compared to 64-bit

If you compared 32-bit versions of Firefox to their 64-bit builds on Windows in the past, you would have found out that they would differ in several aspects:

64-bit builds were only available for the Nightly channel. They were not provided as stable, beta or aurora builds.

You could only run "some" plug-ins on 64-bit versions of Firefox, and not all of them. While Adobe Flash and Java did work, others did not.

The crash reporter was not enabled on 64-bit versions of Firefox.

Firefox 64-bit on Windows was not officially supported by Mozilla (which means that you were on your own).

The 64-bit version of Firefox for Windows was considered a Tier-3 platform by Mozilla, which meant that it "might or might not work at any time".

If you look at the situation right now, you will notice that a lot of things have changed.

Firefox 64-bit for Windows is offered as the primary version by Mozilla now. It is available for the release channel and supported by Mozilla. Plugins are no longer an issue as Mozilla dropped support for them (except Flash) recently.

Downloads

You can download the 64-bit version of Firefox from Mozilla's official download site. This was not possible in the past but the installer that the organization provides on its main site will install the 64-bit version of Firefox if the system supports it.

If you run the browser on a system with Firefox installed, you will notice that it will share the profile with that version automatically. You cannot run both versions side by side at the same time, unless you run one of the two versions with the -no-remote -p test command (test is the name of the second Firefox profile that you want to load).

Alternative

Third-party forks of Firefox exist that provide access to a 64-bit version. You can download the 64-bit version of Pale Moon for example. The browser is compatible with all 64-bit operating systems from Windows Vista on and supports all the things that Firefox supports as well.

This may also be an option for Firefox users who do not like the new Australis interface that will be enabled in Firefox 29, as Pale Moon won't switch to that.

Closing Words

Mozilla moved from supporting 32-bit versions of Firefox for Windows exclusively to prioritizing 64-bit of Firefox for Windows in recent years. While it is still possible to download a 32-bit copy of Firefox, it is the 64-bit version that is offered by default now.

Summary

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Everything you need to know about 64-bit versions of Firefox for Windows

Description

The article looks at the current state of 64-bit Firefox, and provides you with information on the benefits and disadvantages of running it.

Author

Martin Brinkmann

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Ghacks Technology News

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

I second the endorsement of Cyberfox. It is my default Web browser and I’ve been using it for many months. I doesn’t seem to suffer from major memory leaks as much as the full 64-bit versions of Firefox I’ve been keeping current for a long time. Waterfox looked interesting, but I have not used it enough to have any opinion about it versus comparable releases of Firefox.

The title of this article gave me the impression that it would be about Mozilla’s intention to release a stable 64-bit version of Firefox sometime within the year. It was only when I was nearing to the end that I realised that the author had mentioned absolutely nothing of the sort throughout most of the entire article, lol, I thought to myself ‘wait a minute, did I miss something or did Martin leave out a very important detail here?’. Only when you get to the very last paragraph is the possibility of 64-bit version of Firefox even speculated about, Ah man! My expectations were far too high!

If you have ever bought a product expecting to find an item that was not included into the package then you have a good idea of how I felt when reading this article (who knows, maybe that item got into one of the folds of the packaging or is hiding behind some Styrofoam or something), only after giving up do you flip the cover over to affirm that the item your looking for is indeed advertised on the package do you discover the phrase ‘item not included with product’ written in small letters on the bottom right hand corner(!)

As much as I would like a 64-bit version of Firefox, I’m just not willing to go Nightly, I’ve been down that road before and I didn’t particularly enjoy it.

On a side note, I downloaded a couple of 64-bit versions of Firefox based alternative browsers and I couldn’t get any of them running on Windows 8.1, have they worked for anyone else?

On another note in regards to the browser, I’ve noticed that Firefox 26 keeps crashing whenever I use the search bar, the only search bar related add-ons I am using is ‘add to search bar’, Firefox continues to crash despite me having disabled the add-on, is anybody else getting that?

I have no idea why Mozilla would shutdown the development of a 64-bit version of Firefox, 64-bit is obviously the way forward, the most significant benefit being the amount of RAM allocated, most computers now a days come with a 64-bit processor and more and more software development teams are creating software specifically for 64-bit architecture.

A 64-bit version of Firefox is of interest to me because I recently invested in 8gb of RAM for my laptop, even though that laptop has 64-bit processor it was running on a 32-bit version of Windows 8.1 (lol) which I upgraded from a 32-bit version of Windows 8, I wouldn’t be able to get access to all of that 8gb of RAM beyond 4gb due to the limitations of 32-bit architecture and seeing as you can’t ‘upgrade’ a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit OS, I therefore had to resort to installing a clean copy of the 64-bit version of Windows 8.1. I needed the extra RAM because I tend to do some RAM intensive work from time to time.

Prior to upgrading the RAM I was completely clueless as to what 64-bit architecture meant, so I decided to investigate about it. Now, if my understanding is correct, 64-bit processors run 32-bit programs through ‘emulation’ and not natively, despite there being a marginal performance difference between 32-bit and 64-bit architecture, having a program that was specifically created to run natively on 64-bit architecture is obviously the better choice as opposed to through 32-bit emulation.

If the people who conceptualised the 32-bit architecture never had the foresight to envision a future beyond 4gb of RAM for the PC of the average user (which is still a more than reasonable amount for the average user), then I can’t even imagine what the computing demands are going to be like for the average user in the future using 64-bit architecture, will the PC of average user ever exhaust the limits of that architecture to the point for need 128-bit architecture(!?) given the insatiable nature of human endeavour, I think the answer is yes!

Yay, and now we all set sail for yet another voyage around The Sun on spaceship Earth, here is to the hope that this endeavour turns out to be a more exciting and prosperous one than the last for all of those who made it out of 20(13) alive.

I would like to correct the part in my comment where I stated that 64-bit architecture is marginal in terms of performance to 32-bit architecture which is not true, 64-bit architecture excels 32-bit architecture in certain aspects.

64-bit architecture does nothing to improve overall gameplay compared to 32-bit architecture aside from improving the processing efficiency (not quality) of video and sound, it does nothing for graphics performance.

@Barnassey – I know, I posted that comment because you touched on the topic of 64-bit and gaming, I wanted to add some information to the topic simply to be informative. I was going to mention that but I got lazy.

I did not know the 32b of Firefox had a RAM usage cap when running on a 64b o/s, but from what I recall reading somewhere about Firefox 64b, not all of Firefox extensions can run on the 64b version. Is this true Martin, or did I read something wrong? I knew FF64 ran faster and considering my Christmas gift to myself is a Hex-core 4.6Ghz 16G RAM upgrade from a quad 3.1 4G RAM, but maybe I can get better loading and reactions for all the 30+ extensions I use in FF32b. Any thoughts?

Hmm, I installed it anyways and all of my 32b extensions but one got installed to the 64b version (Nightly). The single one that didn’t work is a bit inconvenient without it but as with all things, I learn to adapt.

I first learned of it at http://www.mozillazine.org, it’s knowledge base section, and the option initially was or seemed to be preceded by two hyphens, –no-remote, rather than a single hyphen. So I just checked the website again to verify this and the option is shown as preceded by a single hyphen, albeit two still works correctly.

Anyway, people can learn a little more about the option and related bugs by doing a Web search of mozillazine.org or kb.mozillazine.org (knowledge base) for “-no-remote”. Using the main domain rather than the KB one, people will be able to also get any related forum links, f.e. Those will often be excluded when searching only the KB domain url.

It’s useful and not only for testing purposes. I often make use of it for normal Web surfing when wanting to do some using a different Firefox profile. It permits having and making use of different Firefox bookmarks files.

MozillaZine is a Firefox user community website, rather than provided by Mozilla; and it’s a useful website for FFx users to know about. It’s been available for a decade or more.

Actually, it’s for all Mozilla software products, instead of only for Ffx.

When Ffx users think to possibly have add-on or extension problems, then MozillaZine is a website to check. There’s an add-ons compatibility information page, f.e. It lists add-ons for which there’re known compatibility problems. Descriptions for the problems are provided. This usually includes which add-ons a problematic extension has compatibility problems with or causes problems for.

-no-remote isn’t an add-on. It’s a built-in feature that Mozilla developers intended only for themselves but which any Ffx user can make use of.

I thought that option only permitted one additional instance of Ffx to be run, but the following page certainly seems to indicate that any number of different Ffx instances can be simultaneously opened.

Tested. I already had a second instance of Ffx open and just tried with a third profile. Definitely works.

Making use of different profiles means we can have different bookmarks files. Being able to run more than one instance of Ffx at a time or side-by-side means be able to use different bookmarks files without needing to close or end the first instance of Ffx that a user has started. And being able to do this permits using different profiles for different uses. This, in turn, can help users to avoid creating very large bookmarks files.

It doesn’t seem to be a problem any longer for me, not with the more recent and powerful PC obtained in 2011, albeit a second-hand machine from a few years earlier; plus also using XP. But it used to be a problem to have huge bookmarks files and we could then easily find help at MozillaZine, f.e., where we’d learn that we should export the boomarks file to create a backup of it and then start a new file again, or just clean out what we didn’t want to retain for presently used file. Doing this many years ago helped to improve Ffx start-up time quite a lot; but, while there may still be a little start-up delay because my main bookmarks file being sizable, say, it’s very bearable today.

This -no-remote feature has existed with Ffx or Mozilla products for a decade or more and it isn’t only for 64-bit versions of the products.

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